Disrespect for election observers in Hessen

My fellow friends from the CCC have tried their best to observer the elections in Hessen (Germany) yesterday. The amount of resistance they've met is more than shocking. If you want to read more about this (in German), I'd suggest reading Frank's blog entry, Holger's blog entry and the official CCC release on this subject.

In fact, in some of the municipalities the election supervisors have received official statements warning them about the CCC's intention to disturb the elections. What nonsense is this ?!?

Having been part of a CCC election observer team in the past, I can only state that this is beyond anything that we've seen before. Why would there be any resistance against quiet and peaceful observation of the elections?

The CCC election observers have absolutely zero history of ever having disturbed an election in any possible way. I'm sure you can ask about any municipality that has had first-hand contact about this. We know the laws and regulations very well, and want to do nothing else but to _observe_ the